News

NixOS 16.09 released

Oct 03 2016

NixOS 16.09 “Flounder” has been released, the sixth stable release
branch. See the release notes
for details. You can get NixOS 16.09 ISOs and VirtualBox
appliances from the download
page. For information on how to upgrade from older release
branches to 16.09, check out the manual section on
upgrading.

NixOps 1.4 released

Jul 20 2016

NixOps
1.4 has been released. This release contains contains many
nice new features. See the manual
for details.

NixOS 16.03 released

May 01 2016

NixOS 16.03 “Emu” has been released, the fifth stable release
branch. See the release notes
for details. You can get NixOS 16.03 ISOs and VirtualBox
appliances from the download
page. For information on how to upgrade from older release
branches to 16.03, check out the manual section on
upgrading.

NixOS 15.09 “Dingo” has been released, the fourth stable release
branch. See the release notes
for details. You can get NixOS 15.09 ISOs and VirtualBox
appliances from the download
page. For information on how to upgrade from older release
branches to 15.09, check out the manual section on
upgrading.

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2015, the
first Nix Conference, will take place on November
14—15th 2015 in Berlin. For more information, see the
NixCon website. And please
consider submitting a
talk!

NixOS Foundation

Aug 09 2015

The NixOS Foundation
was started to improve our ability to maintain and extend the infrastructure
used by the Nix related projects. If you would like to support us, please go
here and donate some money!

NixOS 14.12 “Caterpillar” has been released, the third stable
release branch. It brings Linux 3.14, systemd 217, Glibc 2.20,
KDE 4.14.1, and much more. See the release notes
for details. You can get NixOS 14.12 ISOs and VirtualBox
appliances from the download
page. For information on how to upgrade from older release
branches to 14.12, check out the manual section on
upgrading.

We’re having a NixOS sprint at the Kiberpipa hackerspace
in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on August
23—27. Joining is free! For more information and to
register, please go to the sprint
page.

NixOS 14.04 released

May 30 2014

NixOS 14.04 “Baboon” has been released, the second stable
release branch. It brings Linux 3.12, systemd 212, GCC 4.8,
Glibc 2.19, KDE 4.12, light-weight NixOS containers, and much
more. See the release
notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.04 ISOs and
VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on
how to upgrade a 13.10 system to 14.04, check out the manual
section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.2 released

May 30 2014

NixOps
1.2 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual
for details.

A serious security
vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL. All stable
NixOS releases prior to version
13.10.35708.15a465c are vulnerable. (You can
see your current version by running nixos-version.) To
upgrade to the latest NixOS version, run nixos-rebuild
switch --upgrade. You can verify whether you are safe by
running

$ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl

If this shows any OpenSSL version prior to 1.0.1g, you may be
vulnerable.

The stdenv-updates branch has
been merged into the master branch of Nixpkgs. The main
change are that brings is that Nixpkgs/NixOS are now based on
GCC 4.8 and Glibc 2.18, in addition to many smaller updates.

NixOS 13.10 released

Dec 01 2013

We have released NixOS 13.10, the first stable branch of NixOS.
Its goal is to provide a safe branch for production environments
that need bug fixes and security updates, but not the
potentially destabilising changes that sometimes occur on the
unstable branch. You can get NixOS 13.10 ISOs and VirtualBox
appliances from the download
page. See the announcement
for more information. For information on how to switch an
existing NixOS machine from the unstable channel to 13.10, check
out the manual
section on upgrading.

Nix 1.6.1 released

Nov 28 2013

Nix
1.6.1 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix
release but has some minor new features. See the release
notes for details.

Nix 1.4
has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release that
addresses a security problem in multi-user mode. See the release
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

NixOS switched to systemd

Feb 21 2013

NixOS has switched from Upstart to systemd!
Systemd brings many advantages such as better dependency
management, socket-based activation of services, per-service
logging, cgroup-based process management, and much more. (Read
the announcement.)

Nix 1.3 released

Feb 05 2013

Nix 1.3
has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See
the release
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Our continuous build system, Hydra, now produces binary
tarball distributions of Nix for Mac OS X (Darwin), FreeBSD
and Linux. The tarballs contain all dependencies of Nix, making
it a lot easier to install Nix on those platforms. To install,
download a binary tarball, unpack it in the root directory, then
run nix-finish-install. See the manual
for more information.

Nix 1.0 released

Jun 11 2012

After almost two years of development, Nix 1.0
has been released. See the release
notes for an overview of the most important improvements.
For installation information, see the manual.

PatchELF 0.6 released

Dec 07 2011

PatchELF
0.6 has been released. Apart from some bug fixes, it adds
support for executables produced by the Gold linker. See the README
for details.

The NixOS project is (slowly) migrating from Subversion to Git!
The master repositories will be hosted in the NixOS organization on GitHub. For the moment, just a
few subprojects have been migrated, such as Hydra and Charon. Thanks to
Tianyi Cui for donating the NixOS GitHub organization.

Nix-dev mailing list moved

Oct 14 2011

The nix-dev mailing list has moved. The address is now
nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl (web
interface).

Nix
0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the
release
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 0.14 released

Mar 04 2010

Nix
0.14 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix
release. See the release
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix logo

Dec 25 2009

Long overdue, the Nix project finally has a logo!
The logo was originally created by Simon Frankau for the Haskell
logo competition, who kindly gave us permission to use it
for the Nix project. (The snowflake motif is even more
appropriate for Nix, because nix is Latin for
snow.) Any further modifications are entirely our
fault.

Nix 0.13 released

Dec 05 2009

Nix
0.13 has been released. This is mostly a bug fix release,
although it also adds some new language features. See the release
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Lluís Batlle has updated OpenOffice.org in Nixpkgs to 3.0.1
(screenshot).

KDE 4.2 in Nixpkgs/NixOS

May 07 2009

We now have a fairly complete set of KDE 4.2 packages in Nixpkgs
and NixOS. Previously we had KDE 3.5, but it was rather
incomplete: just kdelibs and kdebase.
Now we have all that desktop
goodness, such as kdemultimedia,
kdenetwork and kdegames. You can
enable KDE 4 in NixOS by setting the
services.xserver.sessionType option to
kde4. Thanks go to Yury G. Kudryashov, Andrew
Morsillo and Sander van der Burg for doing the hard work on
adding KDE 4 to Nixpkgs. (Screenshot 1,
screenshot
2.)

Hydra

Feb 05 2009

Nix
and NixOS
releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based
continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based
build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are
several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for
a project are scheduled and published separately, so that for
instance a (fast) tarball build doesn’t have to wait for a
(slow) Cygwin build; build results are stored in a database,
which will enable all sorts of interesting queries; better error
reporting; a better web interface; and much more. We have
written a draft
paper about Hydra. There are some instructions
available about how to set up your own Hydra server.

Nix
0.12 has been released. The most important change is that
Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are
many other improvements. See the release
notes for details.

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp

Oct 09 2008

The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander
van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been
accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot
Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft
of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s
thesis research on DisNix, an extension to Nix that allows
deployment and upgrading of distributed systems from a single
declarative description. We will continue this research in
the Jacquard PDS
project, which has now started. (We still have an opening
for a PhD student or a postdoc; please contact us if you’re
interested.)

NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!

Jul 16 2008

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by
Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted
for presentation at the 2008
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP).
It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s
HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and
features such as laziness are important for system
configuration management. It also provides some measurements
on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft
of the paper is available.

Website back up

Jun 06 2008

The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling
problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat.
These should be resolved now. Apologies for the
inconvenience.

The Jacquard program of
NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull
Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the
deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous
environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4
years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these
positions, please have a look at this page,
and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco
Visser or Eelco Dolstra.

New NixOS ISOs

Feb 06 2008

New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and
x86_64 are available,
which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few
months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a
convenience, should support more SATA drives, and show online
help (the NixOS
manual) on virtual console 7.

Nix 0.11 released

Jan 31 2008

Nix
0.11 has been released. This is a major new release
representing over a year of development. The most important
improvement is secure multi-user support. It also features many
usability enhancements and language extensions, many of them
prompted by NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution
based on Nix. See the release
notes for details.

Wine now runs on NixOS!
Finally we can run all those legacy
applications... Thanks to Michael Raskin for adding Wine
and a NPTL-enabled Glibc (which Wine seems to need). This is a
nice application of purely functional package composition, by
the way: Wine didn’t work with the standard Glibc in Nixpkgs, so
we just pass
it another Glibc at build time.

In other news, Nix 0.11
and Nixpkgs 0.11 will be released soon.

Commits mailing list

Sep 14 2007

There is now a mailing
list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can
subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit
notifications from the Nix Subversion repository.

We now have KDE running on
NixOS (obligatory
screenshot). Just kdebase for now (Martin
Bravenboer already added kdelibs a long time ago so
that we could run the wonderful KCachegrind),
but it contains all the important stuff (Konqueror, KDesktop,
Kicker, Konsole, Control Center, etc.).

In related news, we can
safely say that, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, NixOS
is not an April
Fools’ Joke.

NixOS progress report

Apr 05 2007

NixOS is now almost usable as a desktop OS ;-). We
have an X server, a bunch of Gnome packages, basic wireless
support, and of course all the applications in Nixpkgs that we
had all along running on other Linux distributions. Here are a
few screenshots:

To quote Eelco Visser: new
hardware for buildfarm at Delft University of Technology has
arrived.

Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines
with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core
Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in
power supply, a console with integrated monitor and keyboard
switches, a rack with room for a couple more machines.

Here’s what we’re going to do with the goodies. The five
Intel machines and the two MacMinis (also Intel) are going to
be used to crank at building hundreds of software
packages. Using virtualisation we should be able to run builds
on multiple operating system distributions. Read
more…

Nix
0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix
release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X.

Nix 0.9 released

Oct 16 2005

Nix 0.9
has been released. This is a new major release that provides
quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a
number of new features. Read the release
notes for details.

Secure sharing paper accepted for ASE 2005

Aug 28 2005

The paper “Secure Sharing Between Untrusted Users in a
Transparent Source/Binary Deployment Model” has been accepted at
ASE 2005. This
paper describes how a Nix store can be securely shared by
multiple users who may not trust each other; i.e., how do we
prevent one user from installing a Trojan horse that is
subsequently executed by some other user?

Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12

Aug 22 2005

The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the
12th
International Workshop on Software Configuration
Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy
“services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our
Subversion server) through
Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configuration
files, control scripts and static data) as components that are
built by Nix expressions. The result is that all advantages
that Nix offers to software deployment also extend to service
deployment, such as the ability to easily have multiple
configuration side by side, to roll back configurations, and to
identify the precise dependencies of a configuration.

Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005

Mar 17 2005

The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component
Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005.
It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages
efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are
updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by
deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store.
Includes techniques such as patch chaining and computing deltas
between archive files.